Smash Notes
Hiten Shah — Self-Awareness as a Superpower, the Two Types of Founders and Lessons From 20+ Years in Entrepreneurship
“Any idea is a hypothetical solution to a problem. It is basically spending time to figure out if your solution to the problem is the right problem to solve first of all”— Hiten Shah Our guest today is Hiten Shah ( @hnshah ) , c o-Founder and CEO at Nira . Hiten has started multiple software companies since 2003 including Crazy Egg , KISSmetrics , and Nira…
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Hiten Shah, co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Nira, uses pirate and explorer for two reflexes he noticed while watching founders build. A pirate sees a feature elsewhere and copies it. An explorer decides the existing version is weak and builds a better or opposite one. At the extremes, a pirate studies the market in order to copy it, and an explorer studies it in order to reject it. Shah says a new founder should notice which reaction gives them energy: they have it, so I should, or they have it and I think it is wrong. He finds the split easiest to see in software, where copying a feature is common.